We’re announcing a new and exciting product called SendMyTask! It’s available at SendMyTask.com, and is a new way to coordinate with everyone around you. And best of all, it’s free to use!

SendMyTask is an even simpler version of eziTask, for those of you who don’t wish to sign in to a control panel to send a task to someone, or don’t need any advanced management or scheduling functions. It’s an extremely low-touch, simple way to send a task to someone, with only two functions:

Send a task (all you need is the person’s email address)

Get notified that the task is done (to your own email address)

Some of the interesting ways that SendMyTask is different from eziTask:

You don’t ever create an account or sign in to an account

Tasks are ephemeral (temporary; less importance is given to keeping a history of tasks done)

Almost no features at all – it’s amazingly simple. You can only send a simple task, and get notified that it’s done.

There’s a short list of recently sent tasks. Each task shows whether its done or not. (Switch computers or clear your cookies and the tasks are gone)

No steps, no attachments, no multiple assignees, no calendar, no repeating tasks, no templates, no cc’d notifications. Even more easy than eziTask.

We see SendMyTask serving a need that’s a slightly different use case from eziTask, and both products will operate in parallel to serve these different use cases. For eziTask, a controlled and organized task list is saved in your business’s account, and it’s a process-oriented way to run your business day-to-day. All tasks are saved and kept for record-keeping, and a lot of organization features are there so that you can tune your business’s task management to your liking.

SendMyTask on the other hand, is a wild horse. Fire off tasks to anyone as long as you have their email address. These are simple, quick tasks that don’t need a ton of explanation. They’re tasks that you may not really care about keeping a history of, you just care that they get done at some point. After firing off a task to someone, they get notified of the task, and simply click the “Done” button when they’ve finished, and you’ll get an email about it. Then you move on to whatever is the next task that you need to be done. It’s all about fast-paced tasks – it takes less than 30 seconds to send a task, and less than 5 seconds to see in your inbox when a task is done. It could be a great way to take items from your todo list that you need help with, and send them over to a buddy or coworker.

For those of you who feel like you could use something like this, check out SendMyTask! For those of you who need something more organized and full-featured, check out eziTask!

New findings about scheduling tasks

I’ve actually come across an entirely new technique that improves productivity even more than our previously mentioned techniques. It’s actually a technique that’s used by many of the ultra-successful, and to great effect. Previously in Part 1 of our guide to productivity, we mentioned a ton of techniques to make yourself get things done more effectively, but today let’s improve on that even more with one technique that has been a guiding principle of some of the greatest entrepreneurs and business owners alive.

This technique is a change to how you organize your tasks. Instead of making a to-do list of tasks and repeatedly looking upon it to pull the next task to perform, we schedule them on a calendar. That’s it! The technique is simple, but let me explain further all the intricacies behind it, why it works, and the small but extremely important differences in how we go about it.

To give credit to where it’s due, I’ve actually come across this technique here, an amazing podcast by Kevin Kruse. It actually kind of blew my mind when I first read through the transcript, since it’s such a simple technique but has huge ramifications for how your day is run, and changes your behavior entirely through this simple change. I highly recommend reading through it when you get a chance, and I hope that the principles behind it resonate with you as well. I’ve actually accidentally exercised the technique before, but never sat down to think about why it works, and forgot about it for a long while. Ever since reading and watching the podcast, I’ve actually restarted the habit of scheduling, and it’s been in fact quite effective for me.

So how does it work? The basic premise is that a to-do list is more like a wish list that constantly nags at you. How many of you would make a long to-do list, only to find out that not all the tasks listed on it were performed today, but half the to-do list remains for you to work on tomorrow? And when tomorrow comes, more tasks are added to the list, and you end up with a long list of things you’d love to get done, but never seems to be fully done, and the simple presence of all those tasks on your list become an annoyance, or even a stress that never goes away. On top of that, to-do lists are often a mix of tasks that need to be completed in an urgent manner but may not be the most important long-term, and tasks that are extremely important long-term but may not kick back at you with immediate consequences if they aren’t completed in a timely manner. And that really is the crux of the problem: the important but not urgent tasks are repeatedly pushed back because more time-sensitive things keep getting put onto the top of the list, even if they don’t necessarily contribute as much to your long-term end result.

Scheduling things, on the other hand, gives a distinctive and clear time slot to a task. Every day, you will refer to your calendar instead of your to-do list. Whenever a time block of a task comes up, you dedicate that time slot to the task. If something is not on the calendar, you simply don’t do it. If something comes up that’s important enough for you to do, then add it to the calendar in the next available time slot. Your work, your time with family, your daily rest, your phone calls, your vacations, your errands, schedule it all onto your calendar. It is much harder to put things off if the current time slot on your calendar tells you that this is the only thing you need to do right now, and your mind doesn’t need to think about what else needs to be done, because everything else important already gets another time slot sometime in the future. Instead of looking at your whole to-do list and evaluating which task to pick off every time you’re free (often you’ll pick off the one that’s easiest instead of the one that’s most important), with a calendar you are making a decision now about what is most important, and scheduling it into the calendar so you no longer need to choose when the time comes. It gives you a plan for the day, instead of needing to do decision making (on which task to pick off next) each time that you are able to tackle the to-do list.

It also gives you an opportunity to put off things that aren’t as important. When someone asks for a short meeting for some coffee and brain-picking, you have the opportunity to say, “let me figure out when the next available slot on my calendar is”, and slot them in at a convenient time. It’s much easier for your mind to get lost without a calendar, since your inner need to please others will reluctantly agree to that coffee meeting, which is happening now, and you have effectively inadvertently delayed more important tasks that actually contribute to your success in the long term. This concept becomes even more effective if you have a strict allotment of time slots for each type (or priority) of activity. For example, imagine that you allow yourself a ratio of 50% important work, 30% family time, 10% personal time, and 10% other. When a co-worker invites you to an un-important meeting, you can schedule him into the next available slot of the “other” category, assuming that slots are still available in that category. If no more slots are available in the generic “other” category, then keep moving forwards in your calendar and schedule him in for three weeks later. This way, you’ll never inadvertently push back the most important things in your life. As an added bonus, your coworker might simply say to you, “it’s quite alright then, three weeks from now is too far away, this meeting wasn’t so important anyway, I’ll let you get back to your busy schedule”.

Scheduling makes sure that you stick to your priorities. You might say, and truly feel, that your family and kids are the most important things in your life. But work happens, and slowly but surely, you only get an hour or two with the kids per week, and your happily-married-to-you significant other gets the same treatment. In no way do you feel that they are less important to you, but it’s simply a failure to organize your time effectively, and scheduling your family time on your calendar goes a long way to fix that. In a different situation, if you are working on several different projects with differing returns on investment (e.g. income), it’s easy to get bogged down by a lower-paying project, impeding some of your higher paying projects. Let’s say that you’re in the construction industry, and you are working on two different projects, one to build an apartment complex where the profit will be $1 million, and another smaller project renovating a home where the profit will be $200 thousand. The large project is going swimmingly, and the client is easy to work with. However, the smaller project was a bit of bad luck, where the client is fussy and keeps asking for changes, local zoning codes keep getting in the way, and for various other reasons is taking even more of your valuable time than even the larger project. It’s easy to get pulled into the immediate situations and inadvertently delay progress on the larger project due to immediate communication concerns with the smaller project, risking the much larger payout from the larger project. This is the perfect situation to allocate time slots to each project that is proportional to its importance; so you would allow yourself to schedule five time slots per week for the larger project for every one time slot for the smaller project, since the larger project has a 5x potential profit. This doesn’t need to be an absolutely strict rule, as there are always special situations where your business needs differ, but it’s good to stick to the rule as much as possible, perhaps only rarely making exceptions when it’s best to apply your own educated judgement. Of course, the standards for what is most important to yourself or your business, and the amount of priority to assign to different categories, is all up to you. Some may find family to be most important, some may find a particular project within their work to be most important, some may find that exercise and staying healthy is their priority, but the key guideline here is that the most important things get the most time scheduled onto the calendar, whatever your priorities are.

Part 2: Tools & Environment

Part 2.1: I like big monitors and I cannot lie

Buying a big monitor can be one of the best investments you can make, as someone interested in improving your own productivity. This will be a guide to buying a big monitor for the purpose of increasing personal productivity, and will have tips for what to look out for. By my own personal anecdotal evidence, I feel that I work at least 10% better with a bigger monitor. That may sound like a small number, but over time it really adds up. As someone trying to make money or build a huge project, ten percent of your project is usually worth much more than the cost of a big monitor.

You shouldn’t just take my word for it either; here are some specific ways that a bigger monitor can help you save time:

1. Laying two documents side-by-side on a big monitor, instead of needing to alt-tab between the two windows, saves valuable seconds. Work will often require at least two windows, perhaps one browser window for reference, and one text document for editing, for example. Imagine that every time you needed to look up some information in the browser, you’d need to alt-tab to the browser window, then alt-tab back to the text document to edit. And if you have a momentary lapse in mental acuity during that moment, you’ll probably need to do that whole process again. Depending on the specific industry you work in, or specific project being worked on, three windows or four windows can be required, and repeatedly cycling through the windows uses up valuable time when your mind is focused on the actual work. And not only does it save time, but it’s also helpful that your mental focus isn’t diverted away from the task at hand. Simply glance over at the desired information, instead of rushing to cycle through windows searching for it. I’ve found that around a third of my work, often the most involved and most difficult parts of my work, involve at least two windows, and a fraction of that will require three or four windows. I have a big enough monitor to stack four windows into a rectangular configuration, and that gives me both a ton of time savings and decreases the amount of frustration I experience trying to find the right information.

The size of this monitor gives me bliss and a desire to tackle big problems

2. No matter whether you use MacOS or Windows or Linux, you will need to browse through and move your files every so often. Sometimes you’ll be lucky and will be browsing through a small set of files, but every so often you’ll need to navigate to a folder with a huge number of files, potentially with thumbnail previews of each file. A good example of this is when organizing photos, which is a common use case for home users, and an even more common use case for photographers. Not only do the photo files need to be shown, but it would be ideal to simultaneously be able to see the contents of the photo within the thumbnail preview, to get a quick idea of where the photo is from and which photo it is within the series. On top of that, organizing the photos would often require moving the photos from one folder into another folder, in which case it would be helpful to have a second window open to drag and drop files to (ideally without needing to overlap them, so that you can see the contents of both simultaneously). Not everyone uses this feature, but I tend to browse files using a column view, where the whole hierarchy of folders is displayed at once. This way I can navigate up and down the folder structure quickly using the keyboard, and I can see my exact place within the file hierarchy. The bigger monitor enables me to do that (it enables me to see more information at once, and enables me to work using the particular workflow that I prefer).

With big windows, I can actually see all my files; copying between folders is also easier

3. Having a big monitor can make sorting through all those open tabs in Chrome (insert your choice of browser here) easier too. Especially when researching a new subject, or trying to get to the root cause of a problem, I often do a Google search and open a bunch of links in new tabs, pumping out a dozen or more new tabs almost as a todo list for myself to read those search results to find the information that I’m looking for. Then I’ll slowly go through each tab and read through them. This is just one workflow that suits myself, but others may have other workflows that require having a bunch of tabs open, or maybe you’re just the type who tends not to clean up unused browser tabs. Whatever your particular workflow, being able to see at once the titles of all your open browser tabs can be a time-saver, instead of having lots of tabs being shrunken and bunched up automatically by the browser due to not having enough horizontal space on your screen.

These tabs are getting out of hand. There are actually six tabs being hidden in that little folding area on the left of the tabs bar. Tabs get folded when they become too many to fit on the screen.

4. Sometimes your work becomes so complex that one single window could take up a huge amount of space. One good example of this could be a giant financial Excel spreadsheet, with many formulas connecting different cells within the Excel spreadsheet, and charts in various places to better analyze the data. Or perhaps you’re editing a photo or drawing a complex flowchart. In these situations, the main window of your work may take up a whole screen, and the bigger the screen, the more data you can keep in sight at once, making analysis easier and also reducing the amount of times you need to scroll around the screen to reach the portion of work you need to edit. Doing extra scrolling is especially annoying when you have a mouse that only has a vertical scroll wheel – to scroll sideways you’ll need to take your hand off the mouse and move to either the keyboard arrow keys or the trackpad. Again, it’s a very small benefit, but when you’re pressed for time and need to complete huge projects, these little time savings here and there do add up.

Some Excel spreadsheets can get pretty big, especially in finance. This is all fake numbers, but you get the point.

5. A lot of apps have toolbars for tweaking a document, or info windows that make it easier to inspect a particular area of work. This is a problem that anyone familiar with the Adobe Creative Suite would know all too well. When editing a photo in Adobe Photoshop, or drawing in Adobe Illustrator, there are a ton of toolbars that take up a large fraction of the screen, and it would be great to have more space for the actual image being edited. For myself, I am not a graphic designer, and so haven’t had a ton of experience with the Abobe suite, but I do use a lot of programming IDEs (for editing code) that do have a lot of toolbars. An example is when debugging a website by looking at its code and any errors that popped up, I’ll upload some screenshots below.

If only I could see both the code and the actual site

Give me some space for my toolbars! Photoshop and the Adobe Creative Suite can take up a lot of screen real estate with their toolbars.

Now before going out and buying the most expensive giant monitor in the store, definitely calculate the ROI (return on investment) of your potential purchase. Say that you’re looking to upgrade to a 30-inch monitor that costs $500, and afterwards you can resell your current 21-inch monitor for $50. That’s an investment of $450. Maybe you do $2000 worth of paid projects each month, and if you get a 10% improvement in work speed, it can mean over the course of a year you’ll be able to take 10% more projects than you would have. That’s $2,400 of extra project income. Of course this is assuming that you working faster makes the project go faster; if you are still blocked by external decision-making or inefficiencies, you can at least alleviate the situation by working on another project while waiting for those external blocks to disappear. If you’re working on a salary, then perhaps you could get a bonus if you get work done more efficiently, or at least you could get everything done faster and go home earlier to spent time with family or friends, so being more efficient should still be useful (and if you’re on a salary most likely you can sweet-talk the company to buy the monitor anyway).

Now the major disclaimer here is that a bigger monitor doesn’t just magically make your lazy butt complete work without trying. The bigger monitor is enabling you to work harder and faster by removing some of the efficiency blocks of not being able to see all your work at once, but you’ll need to push yourself to get in front of that monitor and start working in the first place, instead of deciding to watch a nice movie on it instead (of course that’s another benefit of the big monitor for when you’re done with work).

Big monitor buying tips

When purchasing a monitor for being more productive, there’s a few big factors to consider:

1. Resolution – Resolution of a monitor simply means the number of pixels that are displayed on the monitor. The more pixels, the more content can be crammed onto the screen. Usually, more is better here, so do research the resolution specifications of a monitor before purchasing, though usually the price of the monitor goes up as well with higher resolutions. I’m currently typing this blog on a MacBook Air whose screen has a resolution of 1440×900 pixels (this means that its screen is 1440 pixels wide, and 900 pixels high). Usually on this size screen, I would need to maximize windows to be full screen, and simply alt-tab (or more accurately command-tab on a Mac, it’s a keyboard shortcut to switch apps) when I need to look at a different app or window. I’ll go over cool keyboard shortcuts later in the guide for those who would like to learn more. On the MacBook Air, having two windows side-by-side on the screen is possible, but it feels just a little bit too cramped, especially if both windows contain a large amount of actual useful content. When plugged into an external monitor with 1920×1080 resolution, I tend to find myself being able to have two windows side-by-side fairly comfortably, especially when the windows are just webpages or text files. With bigger Excel spreadsheets though, maximizing the window is still needed just to see all the columns within the spreadsheet, and very little room is left for a second window, with perhaps enough space left over for a reference text file or a narrow window of some sort. Now I do also own a large 2560×1440 monitor, and that, is a joy to use. Putting two windows side-by-side, even some somewhat wide Excel spreadsheets or coding windows, is no problem. Sometimes I will put four windows on screen simultaneously, one on each corner. For my own workflow, I can have a browser window open for testing and researching, a code window for editing, a text file for notes and other reference materials, and a Slack window for communicating with the team. It’s like having four small monitors arranged in a rectangular configuration, and has been a huge improver of productivity. Now of course, a big 2560×1440 monitor split into four, is four 1280×720 tiny windows, roughly the size of a very cheap 10-inch netbook. What if, there was something just a little bit bigger still? Welcome to the world of 4K monitors. Also known as UHD (Ultra High Definition), there are monitors that have a resolution of 4096×2160 pixels. At this size, you literally can put four 1920×1080 windows into a rectangular configuration. That’s four monitors stacked together, four monitors that are the size of what those normal unproductive people buy, and that should make you very, very, happy. As a suggestion from personal experience, I would recommend monitors with more than 1920×1080 resolution to anyone buying new (e.g. don’t buy the 1920×1080, go for something bigger), because the increase in price becomes small relative to the productivity gained over the perhaps 10 years of owning that monitor.

2. Size – Of course if you purchased a 13-inch monitor with a resolution of 4096×2160 pixels, that will not do you much good. Each pixel will become extremely small, and the things that are being displayed on your screen will appear very small as well. A character in a text document, which would normally take up 10 pixels of space, would appear much smaller than you would be used to, simply because each pixel would need to be much smaller in order to cram all those pixels into a space of 13 inches. A common technique many laptop manufacturers have used is to use a 4K screen with small physical dimensions, and simply make elements on screen take up twice as many pixels as they used to. This makes your text readable again, but the screen acts more like a 1920×1080 screen in terms of productivity (you won’t be able to cram four huge windows together on screen). The one benefit of this setup is that your screen looks amazing, and text and graphics on screen look extremely nice, even though you won’t have the benefit of cramming more content on screen. The moral of the story is, if you wanted to buy a monitor with high resolution but for the purpose of jamming more content on screen, you’d need to buy a monitor that was big enough for its resolution. My 2560×1440 monitor is 27 inches diagonal, and that seems to work out pretty well for my eyes (this does depend to an extent on personal eye health, typical sitting distance away from the monitor, and other factors). If I were to upgrade to a bigger monitor (and boy do I really want to), it would probably be something along the lines of a 40-inch or bigger 4K monitor. If you are nearsighted and prefer to not wear glasses while doing work for example, a 27-inch 1920×1080 monitor would be a good size, or if you are sitting far away from the monitor, buying a 4K LED TV that’s 55-inch diagonal might make sense. Just keep in mind that size and resolution need to go up together if your goal is to cram more content on screen for productivity.

3. Ratio – Most monitors come in a 16:9 aspect ratio; what this means is that the number of horizontal pixels divided by the number of vertical pixels is in a ratio of 16 to 9. If you’re not too excited by math, this just means the monitor is somewhat flat and wide, similar to a piece of printer paper that’s laid sideways. This is fairly well suited to watching movies, since they are generally similar in proportion. This is also fairly well suited to playing games, since the wide-ness feels very immersive in games. However there are a good number of professionals who would much prefer their computer monitors to be 16:10. It’s still wide, but a little bit taller. Examples of 16:10 resolutions would be 1920×1200, or 2560×1600. What this gives you is just a little bit more vertical space, especially when menu bars and toolbars (the dock on MacOS, the taskbar on Windows, many toolbars in various apps) often take up a lot of vertical space. When we’re trying to put more content on screen, that little bit of extra space is always welcome. Recently Microsoft has also been using 3:2 monitors in their latest Surface laptops and all-in-ones, for even more vertical space (the width is only 1.5 times larger than the height). The one problem with these aspect ratios is cost, as 16:9 screens are cheapest to mass produce, mostly because they are the most commonly mass-produced (and things get cheaper to manufacture if they’re produced in bigger batches). For me personally (and this now comes to personal taste), I’m not very picky about aspect ratio, and am perfectly fine with whatever ratio is provided in a monitor. I’d take a 16:10 (1920×1200) over a 16:9 (1920×1080) monitor, simply because it has more total pixels, as long as it wasn’t too much more expensive, but I would personally prioritize total resolution over aspect ratio. I would definitely prefer something that’s 2560×1440 over another monitor that’s 1920×1200, since despite the latter having a taller aspect ratio, I’m still getting more vertical space with the former (1440 is bigger than 1200) simply because it’s a bigger monitor.

4. Quality – I’m going to preface this section with a disclaimer that I’m not very qualified to talk about monitor quality. I go for the cheapest monitors that have the biggest size and resolution, and have been happy with them. I’m typing this on a 2013 MacBook Air, which uses a TN panel (this means that the screen was produced with a technology whose acronym is TN – I don’t know how it works). Many people who are pickier about monitors will say that they don’t like the viewing angles on TN panels (the items on screen are not as clear or bright when you’re not looking at them straight-on), and are very sensitive to monitors displaying colors extremely accurately, etc. Many would prefer IPS panels (they’re made with a technology whose acronym is IPS – I don’t know how it works) for their better viewing angles and color accuracy. I’m not sure if it’s just the way my eyes developed, but I’m okay with most monitors. I can definitely see the difference in higher quality monitors, and they’re pleasing to look at, though I’m not annoyed by lower quality monitors at all, as long as it’s a good resolution. You’re on your own for monitor quality unfortunately, but just go look at them in the store and judge for yourself.

5. Ports – Some nicer monitors will include extra ports such as USB ports, ethernet ports, etc, that are useful as docking stations for ultraportable laptops that don’t have many ports themselves. For example, the new MacBook (just MacBook, not MacBook Air or MacBook Pro) from Apple has only one port – it’s used for charging, monitor output, plugging anything into the laptop really, and as you’d suspect, that’s not enough ports for most people who want to do serious work on it. In this case a monitor that can connect to the MacBook, then in turn allow USB drives and printers and mice to be connected to the laptop through the monitor, can be a very valuable investment. Otherwise, you will need to choose between charging the MacBook, using a mouse, or using a USB drive, because you can’t do more than one of those at a time. Speaking of ports, one of the most important pieces of information you’ll need to research before buying a monitor is: how do you connect your computer to the monitor? There’s a variety of connectors for this: VGA, DVI, HDMI, Thunderbolt, Mini DisplayPort, DisplayPort, USB-C, etc, and it can get a little confusing. But just remember that you’ll need a cable with one end that’s able to plug into your computer, and the other end that’s able to plug into the monitor. Usually that means finding a monitor that has a port with the same name as whatever port is available on your computer – for example if your computer has an HDMI port for plugging in monitors, then go and buy a monitor that has an HDMI port, so that you can use an HDMI cable to connect the two. Sometimes you’ll need an adapter to change one type of port into another, this can get complex so ask your computer manufacturer’s tech support or the monitor manufacturer’s tech support.

6. Multiple monitors & extra-wide monitors – You most likely have seen photos of stock trading floors or computer programmer offices having several monitors connected to a computer, each monitor jammed full of content. You don’t need to go overboard with six monitors like the stereotypical geek’s office (nor will your computer likely support that), but you can still improve your productivity by getting a second monitor. Windows can be dragged between two monitors, and both can be useful space – for example you could have different windows open on each monitor so that it’s easier to see more content at a glance. I often use an external monitor with my laptop, and if my workflow requires three or four windows open, I can keep one open on the laptop screen, and two open on the external monitor. One more exciting way to be productive is curved monitors, which I haven’t actually tried myself, but the basic principle is that the monitor is created to be very wide, giving you a lot of space to work with, but with such a wide display, it’s hard to see the information on the edges of the display because it’s so far from your eyes that the angle of the screen is no longer ideal. So the monitor itself is curved so that the left and right edges are ever-so-slightly wrapped around your eyes for easier viewing. Often, these monitors will have resolutions much wider than usual, so instead of 1920×1080, you might be looking at 2880×1080 (1.5 times wider than 1920×1080) so you can have three documents laid side-to-side for more productive use of the computer. One benefit of an extra-wide monitor, or simply a huge monitor even if it’s not extra wide, is that you don’t have the layers of plastic monitor bezel in between your usable screen space, instead, it’s all fit onto one screen (It’s also easier to pack up if you tend to move apartments or homes frequently).

7. Other – There are many other cool features of monitors that could be useful to you in certain cases, most of which come at a cost (these features cost more to make, and can gain manufacturers some bigger profit margins). Some business monitors, I’ve used some from Dell, can turn so that it’s in portrait mode (taller than wide). This can be useful if you’re working with long documents, or simply prefer to stack windows vertically for some workflows. When you no longer need it, just turn the monitor and it will be back in landscape mode (wider than tall). Some monitors also have height adjustment bases, so if your desk is too low, or you switch chairs, simply adjust the monitor’s height (it’s nice to have, though you could use a book as well). Pen inputs are also fairly useful for some, especially those working with art and needing more accurate ways to input their art, and other examples might be people working in Chinese language who are used to handwriting text as their preferred input method. Touch screens are a useful input method as well, and this does tie into personal preferred workflows whether it’s worth it for you to pay more for the feature. I find myself using mouse and keyboard most of the time, but occassionally want to touch the screen for getting rid of dialog boxes that don’t have keyboard shortcuts assigned to its buttons (for me, it’s all about the speed of getting around the user interface of the computer). As already mentioned earlier, some monitors also include a feature where a screen with extra resolution is used despite the user being presented with a screen that is scaled to a lower resolution, resulting in a lower resolution workspace that looks very clear and nice to look at. How that works is beyond the scope of this guide, but when purchasing, it’s called “Retina” in Apple’s brand-speak, and HiDPI in certain Windows laptops. If you’re buying your own large monitor, perhaps to connect to a desktop or as an external display for your laptop, you can define the “scaling” of the resolution within your operating system’s display control panel.

8. Monitor positioning – This is less of a buying tip, but just a side note on ergonomics of your monitor. I’ve noticed most people’s monitors are lower than they should be. Especially when on the go, people will put their laptop on a desk to use. The keyboard is the right height for typing, but the monitor is attached to the keyboard and therefore very low near the desk. The screen being so low relative to the eyes can cause a lot of strain on the neck (or back, depending on how you adjust your body to make your eyes level with the screen). Using a laptop would be the extreme case; there is no way to raise the laptop screen without raising the keyboard, so there will be discomfort whatever height you move the laptop to. But even with external monitors, many people located the monitor much below eye level, causing unecessary neck or back strain. Take a few heavy books and put them under the monitor, or get fancy and buy a nicely constructed monitor shelf, to raise the top of the viewable screen to eye-level. Whatever your most comfortable and natural sitting position (e.g. you’re not hunching over), move the monitor to the corresponding eye level, and you’ll find over time that your neck or back will no longer be as strained.

I realized that even talking about just monitors, we’ve taken up quite a long blog post. That’s why the whole Part 2 that was supposed to be productivity hacks with all your office equipment has now been split into two sections. Hope that it has been helpful though, and stay tuned for Part 2.2 soon to come!

Comprehensive Guide to Being Productive

This is going to be one of the most comprehensive guides available to being productive. It will contain tips and tricks (and most importantly the reasons why they work) to help you manage your time and get tasks done effectively. I’m writing this as the project lead for eziTask (our online tool for assigning tasks within small businesses), having learned a great deal from helping create eziTask, experience with past attempts at my own startups (for the record they failed, but sometimes failure teaches you the most), and working at some big companies like Amazon and Apple. In this guide you will find both immediate tips you can easily start using today, as well as long term habit changes that will take more significant effort to achieve.

Part 1: Techniques & Habits

Keeping a short goals list

We’ll start with a commonly cited technique for being productive. It’s the simple technique of keeping today’s todo list short. Your goals list for the day should be only two or three items long. That’s it! This is a simple mental trick to push your brain to believe in your own abilities. For myself, over the years I’ve found that overwhelmingly, if I had a long list of todos with 20 tasks written down to complete for the day, I would feel stressed about it, sometimes consciously stressed, sometimes without really realizing it. When even a little bit of stress hits you, your brain automatically wants to get away and rest. Perhaps watching a little bit of YouTube will help me feel a little better and I can get back to work in five minutes? Maybe just a little break looking at some Facebook updates, or a quick nap? Sadly, these don’t actually succeed in reducing your stress, but sometimes you are sitting at your desk and can unconsciously wander into doing these activities.

The reason is simple – you created that stress for yourself by writing so many tasks down, and when you look at them you don’t feel that you’ll be able to easily complete them all today, or at least without resorting to staying at the office into the night or sacrificing time with loved ones. And the solution is simple too, just write down a very short list of two or three items – the most important tasks you’d like to complete today. Everything else that you need to do, put into a separate list that you will not think about nor even look at until tomorrow; they do not exist.

The benefits of this simple productivity technique are awesome, and it works even though you consciously know how the trick works. In practice (and I’ve personally put this into practice many times), this works quite smoothly, and all of the tasks on the small list get done. But what happens when my remaining 17 tasks get delayed to tomorrow, aren’t I just making tomorrow even more busy, you ask? In my experience it works out like this: if I’ve got 20 tasks written to do today, I end up finishing maybe 6, and I feel pretty stressed at the end of the day after forcing myself to complete 10 tasks. However, if I write down 3 tasks, after I easily complete those 3 tasks, I find myself fairly impressed by myself… Holy mackerels and salmons am I a productivity machine! This feels good, let’s take another item off of tomorrow’s list, ’cause I feel like a rock star! And thus it begins, feeling good begets productivity, and you end up finishing 12 tasks for the day.

And a side benefit of this task management technique: being forced to only write down three tasks to do for the day, causes you to think about which three are most important, forcing you to prioritize tasks.

Break it down into multiple steps

One of the most damning roadblocks to being productive is the vaguely written task. Perhaps on your todo list for today, the most important task is to evaluate a new supplier to your business that supplies paper to your printing press business. Your todo list says: Evaluate new paper supplier. This task is fairly difficult to start, because it’s hiding much of what you need to do. In fact, we can separate it into several smaller steps (in reality it could be even more complex, but let’s just use this as an example):

1. Write email to new supplier to order two batches of sample paper

2. Walk across the hall and ask warehouse to retrieve two batches of sample paper from existing suppliers from storage

When you see “Evaluate new paper supplier”, your mind isn’t quite sure yet what to do. The task is not only slightly vague, but also hides the exact steps that you will need to take. In contrast, when you separate the task into smaller steps, you’ll see that each individual step is much more doable and approachable. You’ll feel a much smaller roadblock to starting on step 1, than when looking at the vague task name. You know exactly how to acquire new paper samples (email the new supplier), who to ask for stored paper samples (the warehouse), which tests to do (and if you don’t know how to do them, you’ll know that you’ll need to ask the relevant experts). When the task is vague and broad, you end up dreading the action of starting the task, because you just know that the task carries with it a lot of baggage (you actually need to go through multiple steps to achieve this one task). When the task is broken down into individual steps, you are looking at smaller more achievable mini-tasks, thereby scaring your mind a little bit less, and reducing the chances of you running away and procrastinating.

Keep in mind though what we mentioned earlier, of keeping the goals list short. The whole purpose of that section was to make sure you don’t scare yourself with too many tasks. When you break a task into smaller achievable steps, the shear amount of text in your todo list could be scary and stressful. So keep the broken down steps written on a different page in your notebook, so that when you look at your current task’s individual steps, you don’t see the other tasks for the day, and forget that there are other tasks for the day (this is important because there are potentially two other tasks in the list that could end up scaring you). Once you finish the current task, then start looking at the broader task list again. The key to avoiding procrastination is to manage the little bit of fear in the mind, which just doesn’t like to feel stressed that there are too many tasks to manage.

Check off one thing first

Now that there’s a list of todos (doesn’t matter if you’re looking at your two or three tasks for the day, or focusing in on the list of steps for one particular task), it’s a huge boost to your ego when you check off one item. It’s that first checkbox that makes you feel awesome; it’s the fuel for further productivity. A funny observation of mine (and of some of the mentors I’ve met over the years), is that one of the most important factors in how productive you are in the remainder of your day, is actually how productive you felt earlier that day. If you feel like you’ve achieved a lot today, then you’ll be more likely to achieve a lot in the second half of the day. It’s what some people may call being “on a roll”, and could almost be an addictive feeling of wanting to get more done after already successfully getting some things done.

At the same time, just getting started with a tiny first step of a long involved task can make you no longer scared of the task (yes, I’ve mentioned fear again – I’m scared of my todo list, and I suspect that you are too). Completing a task is almost like moving to a foreign country – you feel a bit scared until you’ve been there for your first day, then that fear simply changes into planning and taking care of logistics. Just like making the first step into a foreign country makes you start losing your fear for it, and start taking care of what you need to take care, taking your first step into a long involved task will have similar effects. We’re trying to change that feeling of being scared and wanting to go back to something you like better (cute cat videos on Youtube), into a feeling of being on a roll, like you’re Donald Trump (the businessman) closing real estate deals one after another. Just get the first step done and checked off, and you’ll find it much easier to continue on.

A useful shortcut if you really need a quick boost to get started on that productivity streak, is to make your first task something extremely easy to achieve. Even if it’s something trivial like “Drink coffee”, put it on your task list, and as soon as your lips touch coffee, check it off as complete! I’ll even make an exception to the “three tasks maximum on your todo list” rule if you want to add “Drink coffee” as your first task, making a maximum total of four tasks for the day, since I suspect drink coffee will be checked off pretty quickly anyways. Really, please do this, check off one thing first from your todo list, even if’s it’s “Drink coffee”. In fact, pushing this exception to the “three task rule” even further, you can add a bunch of quick 5-minute tasks to the front of your queue without worrying too much, since these are so easy that you’ll finish a bunch of them quickly, giving yourself a huge confidence boost and the drive to start tackling your more difficult tasks.

From my own experience, I don’t do this enough. I often have a long list of complicated tasks, and just looking at the list is stressful enough to cause me to run away and eat some ice cream instead. But when I’ve happened to have an easy task on my todo list, and have completed that first task, I’ve really felt the difference in my mental state – I feel like starting on another task because I feel good about the first one.

Time management

A good way to manage productivity is to break work into time segments. The prospect of working continuously into late night with no end in sight is going to be stressful. The prospect of working for 25 minutes, and taking a break, is a lot less daunting. Arranging for a schedule that includes a certain amount of time for rest is also going to be physically beneficial for you. A popular time management scheme is called the Pomodoro Technique. The basic principle is to work in a very concentrated and focused manner for 25 minutes, and then take a 5-minute break. Repeat this cycle a number of times (the suggested method is to repeat four times as a set, but you can tailor to your own needs). During those 25 minutes, it’s a very focused segment where no interruptions are to be responded to (unless it’s a real emergency of course). If a friend sends you a message, ignore. If a coworker sends you a message, ignore. Don’t check your email during the 25-minute segment. In fact it’s probably best to just put your phone off to the other side of your room or office (or quit your email program), unless of course the goal of your 25-minute period is to reach out to people. Focus solely on the one task you need to get done, and nothing else. Once the 25-minute period is over, take a good relaxing rest.

Another technique I’ve found that worked quite well is to set a custom schedule of my own. I really liked using a mobile app called Routines. It’s available for iOS, though I haven’t looked for an Android alternative yet. I created a schedule that fills my day with my preferred schedule, giving myself half an hour for breakfast at 9am for example, then one hour of work, and another half hour of stretching afterwards (and this continues until around dinnertime, when my schedule ends). The schedule works on the same principles as the Pomodoro Technique, with periods of work interrupted by shorter periods of physical activities like exercise or eating, though the lengths of time for each activity may be very different. I don’t try to keep the segments the same length of time as each other, as some are 30 minutes, some are an hour, some are two hours long. A great idea of course is to combine this with the Pomodoro Technique, so for example in a one-hour segment of work, take two 5-minute stretch breaks. Don’t put too many hours in the schedule, because scheduling 10 hours of work per day unconsciously stresses the mind, but scheduling only 5 hours per day makes for a happy and productive day. Simply looking at that 5-hour schedule and noticing that your day ends at 3pm is a great joy, and more often than not you will end up achieving more than if you’ve written a 10-hour schedule simply because once you start to be productive, you tend to continue being productive. Using Routines, the same schedule is automatically repeated for you every day, and the checkboxes for each item become reset once a new day starts. So every day that you work, you can check off each time segment in the schedule, and start fresh the next day. For me, I don’t always get through every checkbox, for example I may skip the 30-minute stretch sometimes, but just having that same schedule in front of me every day, with a fresh set of unchecked checkboxes, is a great tool to motivate myself to shut out interruptions and focus on the task at hand.

Paper is awesome

There’s something quite magical about paper. We live in a digital age where everything we create is saved in our computers or in the cloud, and it’s intangible to us. But paper is something that can be felt, moved around, and be crumpled and thrown against the wall if that’s what makes you happy. It’s another great tool to make yourself more productive.

Next time you have a task list for the day, write it down on paper. You can use Post-Its, they’re small and can be stuck to the edge of your computer screen for easy access. But what I’d actually suggest is to go ahead and buy a luxurious fountain pen topped with an exquisite feather, along with one of those notebooks bound with the softest leather and cashmere. Please do replace the suggested items with whatever you’d like, but the point is to make it luxurious, so you feel important. Not only are you checking off tasks from within the notebook’s pages, but you feel that you look good doing it. You feel like you’re Albert Einstein deeply pondering the Theory of Relativity. You feel like Martha Stewart investing in her next billion-dollar lifestyle business. You feel like Steve Jobs creating the original iPhone. Go ahead and spend ten dollars on a nice notebook, it’ll make work feel good. Of course I would still recommend keeping your task list on the computer (keeping a digital copy affords many conveniences), but when you’re ready to start your day, copy the task list to a notebook, and use that tangible copy for the day.

Going even further than that, have you ever tried to do work on your laptop, and simply stared into a blank white Microsoft Word screen in a state of torpor? It’s usually better to get a blank sheet of printer paper and a pen, and draw out some thoughts on paper first. For some reason, at least in my experience, the freedom of drawing circles and random thoughts on a piece of paper both reduces any roadblocks within your mind, as well as organizes thoughts easier than the screen of a word processor program with a cursor blinking in your face. And of course, this goes without saying, a clean desk helps, one with at least enough space to lay down that piece of printer paper of course, but ideally a very clean desk which helps to clear up your mind as well.

Another cool trick is to write down what you will do in the next hour or two. I’ve often found that if I immerse myself in my current task, I tend to forget what my next task is, and end up doing something not quite useful. I probably have a worse memory than most, but it’s likely that there are others out there who at least forget things occassionally, and this could be very helpful to remind you where to go next.

Money!!

You’re burned out, you’re tired of working, it’s 11pm and you’re ready to go home and watch some TV. An quick half-hour of cartoons could be just that relaxation you need. Then, your boss comes over and says, hey, here’s a thousand dollars cash that I’ll give you as bonus, please just work one more hour. Would you agree to the deal? I suspect that you would very likely agree to it, and I suspect that this hour will be one of the more productive hours of your work life. It’s this immediate return on investment (ROI) that you get excited about, and all of a sudden you no longer remember being tired. We innately have a strong sense of ROI; if you’re investing a number of hours into something, it better be giving you back something in return. Talk about self-fulfillment, helping the world, and spiritual well-being all you want, but if you’re thinking about being “productive”, it almost always involves getting money for your work. Money in our society is roughly correlated with our ability to survive and live well – food and shelter is bought with money, and despite money not being able to buy happiness, it sure as heck prevents many daily situations that cause unhappiness.

Take half an hour to do a mental exercise. Calculate the amount of money that you make by doing one hour of work. If you’re freelancing and get paid by the hour, that’s easy. If you work full-time on a fixed salary, just divide by the number of hours within the salary period. Most people who are reading this article are likely to be compensated in a way that is at least roughly proportional to the amount of work put in. Just knowing that every hour of work that you put in can directly or indirectly cause a certain amount of money to be returned to you, can lead to a rise in productivity. And this exercise has a hidden but even more important benefit: making sure you know what the return on investment is for different types of tasks, gives you insight into which tasks are more important, and which tasks are more “busy work”. Only do something on your todo list if it either directly provides a return on investment of your time, or builds foundations that will in the future lead to return on investment.

Be lazy

This is my favorite technique for being productive. Imagine a straight road going from where we’re standing to a tree that’s 500 meters away. Imagine there also being a curved road that passes through a hill and a valley, that takes 1500 meters to get to the same tree. The shorter path may have taken 10 minutes to walk, while the longer path may take 30 minutes. Perhaps taking a rest, sitting at the fork in the road, and taking 2 minutes to analyze which path to take would have saved us from walking 30 minutes when it could have taken only 10.

In doing work, many (or perhaps most) will continue to do long hours of work every day, tiring themselves enough that it’s harder to see the big picture, and therefore occassionally choose the fork in the road that leads to a more arduous path. Often sitting down and analyzing the situation could save a ton of wasted work.

An example of being lazy paying off (actually, an example of not being lazy not paying off), was in a software project I was involved with. At the time I was working at Apple on the original iPhone before it was released to the world, and we were writing the test software that tested every iPhone that came off the assembly line at the factory. One of the tests was very complex took its original author many hours to write, and often ran into problems that would falsely tell the factory floor that the phone being manufactured was falty, after which the phone was sent to the repair station, where manual inspection happened and no actual problems were found. Many many many dollars were being spent sending perfectly okay iPhones into repair stations and being “repaired”. Digging into the situation, I found that the test was a complex mess of 1000 lines of code. After reading the code line by line and drawing out on a huge piece of paper exactly what it was doing, I figured out what the original author was trying to do, and realized that the guys who wrote iOS already had a function that exercised the piece of hardware that was being tested, and spit out an error if the piece of hardware failed to behave as expected. After all, if a piece of hardware needed to be exercised, iOS probably needs to exercise it already. In the end, the test was revised to be 3 lines of code, and consistently discovered only those phones which truly had hardware defects. The moral of the story is, a little bit of looking ahead and asking around, can save a lot of wasted work. Always keeping an eye open for where work may be wasted, or which tasks are not important enough to be done, can be the most effective productivity boost.

There’s also a whole movement called failing fast, which is often used by entrepreneurs in recent startups. Imagine you’re super excited to build your latest idea: a skate park for teenagers in your city, where the kids can bring their skateboards and make use of your park’s various creatively constructed ramps and pipes to practice and perform tricks on. You’ll cater your park towards boys ages 13 to 19, and get $100,000 in funding to construct features made of concrete and metal, as well as modifying the slopes of a few hills in your park and planting decorative plants. It would cost $5 to enter, and customers can stay as long as they would like. Now there’s always a slight chance that after all that work, and spending all that money, customer uptake is not as high as expected, and you would have failed at the endeavor. Finding out that the park is not profitable after investing so much time and money in it, now that’s what I call a slow, painful, expensive failure. If only we could predict whether this skate park could succeed beforehand, before sinking all that time and money into it? Well, there are ways to make all your potential failure points show up more clearly and quickly, “failing faster”. Well, a few obvious reasons why the park might not get as many customers as needed could be:

1. Teenagers don’t have $5 to spare for a skate park

2. Parents don’t think skateboarding is something they’d want their kids sinking much time into

3. Having a skate park in the location might anger neighbors

Before going ahead and building the skate park, sit down and draw out (on a piece of paper of course) some of the assumptions you have about your customers – some obvious ones could be “my target customers are willing to pay $___ for my product/service”, or “my target customers feel that they need ____ product/service”, or “my target customers already look for a similar product/service through ___”. You could write them as assumptions, or in a format similar to the three items listed above for the skate park, they mean the same thing, just have different grammar (one assumes the customer will do something, one is phrased to say that the customer might not do something).

The next step would be to devise quick and easy tests for each of your assumptions. Each of these should only take minimal effort (especially relative to the amount of effort required to fully carry out your plans). In the case of the skate park project, we’ll need to test that teenagers have the $5 to spare for our skate park, that their parents don’t mind that they spend lots of time at the skate park, and that the skate park won’t anger neighbors.

1. To test that teenagers have the $5 to spare for our entrance fees (and especially that they’ll be willing to spend that $5 on skateboarding), perhaps we can spend several hundred dollars to one or two thousand dollars to rent a set of portable wooden skateboarding equipment. The equipment could contain a number of different shapes and sizes for skateboarders to jump off of and do tricks on, and is laid out in a public area (after getting permission of course) for the weekend. Are passersby interested? Did our small marketing effort attract a lot of people to bring their skateboards and give us $5? The key is that we actually ask customers to pay the $5, this makes the test more accurate, as sometimes people will say one thing and do another. Do a lot of people who paid and tested the park tell you “wow, I wish you guys were here every day for me to skate here!”? The point is, let’s spend $2,000 and find out if our business will work, instead of spending our full $100,000 budget. If this test fails, then we’ve failed quickly (cheaply), and we’ve learned quickly (cheaply) that it may not be worth the effort to spend $98,000 and six more months on the project (that’s $98,000 and six months of hard, non-productive work saved!).

2. To test that parents won’t prevent their kids from frequenting our skate park, we could ask the parents directly what their views are about their kids going skateboarding twice a week, and spending money to do so. To be even more accurate in our testing, after asking the parents, actually offer a pack of ten entrance tickets, perhaps with a discount, and seeing if the parents are willing to buy for their kids. Talking to fifty parents could give some amazing insights.

3. To test that neighbors won’t be angry, we’d ideally recreate the test in the very same spot that we plan on opening the park in. The best idea would be to go back to our rented test park from test #1, and simply keeping it running for a few days in the location of the future real park. Bring bunches of teenagers in. Some teenagers will go skateboarding, some will chat with each other during rests. The noise levels would be most accurate this way, and check if any complaints are received. If this is simply not possible, do a survey of surrounding residents, or research the average demographic makeup of surrounding residents and compare with the city’s public records of noise complaints. The key here is to make sure surrounding residents don’t complain and lobby to shut down the park after it’s up and running.

Perhaps we’ve created a couple weeks of work for ourselves in devising these tests, but they help us in learning what might happen in the future. This testing isn’t a foolproof prediction of the future, but still gives us validated evidence of what will likely happen in the future. And in the chance that the tests fail, we’ve learned the the business would fail after spending $2,000 and two weeks, instead of after spending $100,000 and six months. We’ve “proven” quickly that this business would fail, and are given a chance to modify it slightly or to pursue another business idea that could be much more successful, without needing to go through the full six-month ordeal and in the end finding out that the business fails. It is this method of thinking that makes you clear on what direction you’re going, and that this direction will most likely lead to success. After all, getting 1000 hours of work done, and finding out that the work was wasted, isn’t any more productive than getting 100 hours of work done, and finding out the work was all put to good use.

Stay tuned for productivity hacks Part 2

This is all a lot of information, and if you’ve read all the way down to here, you must be extremely motivated to improve your own productivity. It may surprise you that this is only part 1 of 3 to this comprehensive productivity guide. In Part 2 I will go into more detail about using the right tools and environment to bring up your productivity, including a ton of nice tricks and hacks. In Part 3 I will go into how your body and health could affect productive work time as well. All links will appear here once they’re ready!

If you’re trying to manage a group or small business, give our tool eziTask a try. I’ve put a lot of effort into making it a good tool for assigning tasks to others, and tracking progress on those tasks. It’ll help you achieve some of the tricks mentioned above, especially with breaking tasks down into smaller steps. Since it’s still fairly new, you can (for now) still sign up for free and get a lifetime free account.

Updated: December 12, 2016 (Added link to new technique to schedule tasks) This is a cool new technique that I’ve found, and it’s been working quite well for me, and is the one big technique that extremely successful top entrepreneurs and business owners use to have become so successful.

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